Remora

Has the New York Times ever been this bad before?
I usually read the Times first. I depend on it, in spite of its weakness for simpleminded neo-liberal mantras, its lack of interest in the juicier stories in the city it is based in, and its arrogance. It is the best paper in America.
But this week, my faith in that last claim has been shaken.
Example:
For the last eight months, the NYT has published some rather snipey articles about Bush. This week, as if in repentence, they have taken to publishing toadying article about our child Commander in Chief. Topping them all is R.W. Apple's analysis of Bushiepoo today, which (under a snippy title - Bush Presidency Seems to Gain Legitimacy) discerns, in the zigzags and radically distributed power of the current regime (the first presidency, in my lifetime, in which the vice president's words are routinely given more consideration than the president's), growth. Of course! -- That magic American quality, which takes a temporary biological characteristic located in our hormones and makes of it a virtue of character.

Well, it is hard to find the most ridiculous paragraph in Apple's piece -- every graf sparkles with its own special bad faith. But here's my fave passage:

"At Camp David this morning, the president reached for a down-home metaphor reminiscent of Lyndon B. Johnson's promise of "coonskins on the wall" during the Vietnam war. Declaring bluntly that "we're at war, there's been a war declared," he added, "We will find those who did it. We'll smoke them out of their holes, we'll get them running and we'll bring them to justice."

Perhaps most important, he was visible: in a Washington hospital ward, in a couple of brief exchanges with reporters, amid the awful devastation in New York's financial district, clad in a beige windbreaker, with his arm draped around a retired firefighter. Shyer than most politicians, he sometimes seems to shun the limelight. This weekend, he stepped smartly into it."

Invoking the wildly successful rhetoric of LBJ to move us into war might not be, well, tactful. Didn't we, uh, lose that one? And the photo op catch-up game hasn't, I think, erased the original bad impression of a prez who let his secret servicemen and vice president determine his first responses to a national crisis. Bad news for the rest of us, no matter that polls show people giving Bush their approval. At the moment, you would expect such an outpouring of support for anything that smells remotely American. Hell, right now, my fave song is This Land is Your Land (God Bless America just doesn't have the poetry). It will, no doubt, fade from my top ten list in the next couple months, and Lithium will re-assume its rightful place in my affections.

But the NYT hasn't just been ideologically weak kneed - as a newsgathering organization, they've been behind the curve. The Post has been much quicker in getting pieces of this story and putting them together. The human details of the attack have been gathered everywhere - I have a piece about that in the Austin Statesman, today - but the larger details have been amazingly neglected. For instance, I haven't seen a major piece yet that concentrates not on the terrorists ethnicity, but on their nationalities. Why Lebanese, Saudis and Egyptians? Since we are getting reports that mysteriously speak of a long war - on whom? -- one would think that the subgroups which exist in these places would call for some focus, and especially focus on what it means, if anything, that we are going to war with bits and pieces of populations with whose governments we aren't going to war. This sounds sickeningly like the war on drugs - not a good precedent, campers. So lets have some news stories about what has been happening in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our allies. And a big lacuna out there is why the US allowed the Cole investigation to be, basically, rolled up by the Saudis without protest, which is a key incident, in the series of events that led up to the wtc mass murder. But try arousing the torpid interest of the major newsgathering organizations in a question which lies at the heart of the entangled interests of the US and the Saudis: namely, how the American interest came to be so incorporated into maintaining a highly volatile and corrupt regime in the Arabian peninsula. Don't look for this story any time soon, since the big news organizations mainly (mis) represent the Mideast as a stomping ground for Israelis and Palestinians.